Ahistorical? Moi?

I dropped in at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog just now and realized I must not have done so for awhile, because I hadn’t seen a post from January about something I said. He quotes me disputing in my usual intemperate way the idea that ‘Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God’ and then asks, ‘I wonder, has Ophelia ever read Locke?’ No, of course not; I haven’t read anything. Well, I may have read a few words of Locke here and there (on calendars, jam jars, the sides of buses, that kind of thing), but not actually read. Reading makes my head hurt.

So there’s this thing in the Second Treatise, chapter 2, about the state of nature which is one of

equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

Jonathan adds that ‘Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality that the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise…is an axiom of theology’, and that ‘it is simply ahistorical to deny that our (liberal) conceptions of equality and human dignity have Christian antecedents.’

But is it? I’m not convinced. I don’t deny, in the passage Jonathan quotes, that the Christian ‘view that all have equal worth before God, and the idea of democracy and equality’ were around; what I deny is that it’s possible to know that that particular source was an inescapable source. Maybe it was. Maybe every single person born after Locke’s Second Treatise was steeped in it and had no other source for the idea of equality – but I don’t quite see how anyone could be sure of that. And beyond that, it seems to me inherently unlikely that the idea of human equality is such a far-fetched, odd, unthinkable idea that without Locke, no one would have imagined it. It seems to me that people have a noticeable tendency to develop ideas of equality all on their own, merely by the experience of being treated as unequal. The Thersites effect, one might call it. These things do come up. Seneca talked about a kind of equality; so did Montaigne; at least as possible ideas, if not as desirable goals. So, I don’t deny that Christianity was one antecedent, but I do deny the version that apologists give us, which is that it was the necessary antecedent, that (by implication at least) without it we wouldn’t have the idea at all. I’d need more than the existence of one book by one philosopher to convince me of that, I think.

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9 Responses to “Ahistorical? Moi?”

So what if it turns out that christianity was a (or even “the”) source of the idea of equality? Does that mean I should immediately convert? Seriously, I suspect the Roman Empire may have played the key role here in granting some kind of legal equality as persons to the people they colonized. Stoicism played a key role also. Of course, the universalistic christian religion did get spread together with the Roman Empire, and emperor is equal to slave when it comes to who gets salvation. Unfotunately, that’s pretty much where the equality ends, and christians had no problem with slavery nor with viewing non-christians as inferior. So, much hinges on the terms of the equality – equality of redemption is not the same as equality under the law – which the ancient Athenians had, although not universally, but limited to their citizens (they even had a word for it – “isonomia”). Equality of redemption for christians (which btw those christians who think some are “elected” for salvation don’t even maintain) is a sorry substitute for equality under the law, although it is a consolation for slaves, women and others whom the law of christian nations has often treated as inferior.

If Christians (well, he was a Jew but he’s in the Bible, you know) got us pointed in the right direction on this killing thing, is it really so hard to understand that they invented the idea of human equality?

I mean, it says right there on that stone Moses took from the burning bush, “Thou. Shalt. Not. Kill.” Now which one of those words do you not understand?

I hear ‘thou shalt not kill’ was better translated ‘do no murder’. Otherwise it is in conflict with the herding and farming lifestyle of the sons of Israel. And the wars they fought.

The idea of equality as Christian is an interesting thing. There is constant approval of authority – submission to kings because if they are in power God must have approved them having power. This is a built-in protection agaisnt a State hostile to christianity.

Higher than this submission, is the reversibility of the I-You relationship (yay OB), which is inherent in ‘Love one another as I have loved you’. That is a kind of equality which was I think pretty revolutionary.

Personally I’m completely happy interpreting that passage like so: since there is no “lord and master of us all”, and no “evident and clear appointment” has ever been made, there is no one with the authority to “set one above another”.

I think I shouldn’t have been so fast to make fun of the notion of Christian antecedents of liberalism. After all, I happily acknowledge Greek and Roman ones, too. Paul Seabright gives us some ideas about how to look at things like that.

And in particular, I’m thinking that Paul Belien over at the Brussels Journal makes sense when he talks about a “religious vacuum” in Europe from which Islam is making hay. Possibly Islam is hypertrophying somewhat in the form of Islamic chauvinism and Islamism because of this vacuum.

Mind you I don’t see religion as any solution. But the idea of a “religious vacuum” rings true. I’ve for quite a while now worried about what we would do once we got shed of religion unless humanism was providing us with something “religion-shaped” for us to work with, if for no other reason because we are so used to having one, but very possibly because we tend to generate supernatural beliefs and if we don’t have some cultural structure (other than religion) in place to handle that it _will_ drive us nuts.

The clause I’m interested in in the Locke quote is “unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.” I don’t know what he is referring to here, unless it’s the divine right of kings (which doesn’t cohere too well with his political philosophy, as I recall it), but I read it as the usual dodge: “Everyone is equal, except for the ones who aren’t.

In general, I don’t see the relevance of this “idea X derives from religion Y” argument that is so popular these days. So what? As Phil says, does that mean that we should convert to Y straightaway? That’s an argument with a hole one could drive several trucks through. For one thing, what about all the *bad* ideas in Y? Might it be that they outway the good ones? If idea X (such as political equality) is a good one, there will be non-theological arguments for it.

In Locke’s time, given that the predominant mode of all discourse in Europe was Christian, one needed to couch one’s political arguments in Christian terms to get a hearing at all from a lot of people, but gradually people were learning to think outside the Christian box. (It’s called the “Enlightenment”), and the language of political argument gradually became more secular. It was more of a change in linguistic fashion than anything else.

Yeah, that unless clause is a good dodge. Unless clauses often are. It’s like that one about villainy in the land that Irshad Manji likes to point out.

Anyway, it belatedly occurs to me that the quoted passage from Locke looks deist rather than Christian. But Christians do like to claim that the Enlightenment thinkers got their ideas from, specifically, Christian sources. I remain unconvinced.

“That is a kind of equality which was I think pretty revolutionary.”

Revolutionary maybe but not new or unique. Jesus was neither the first nor the only person to say things like that. What he said also had antecedents – in Hellenistic philosophy, Judaism, etc. It was good stuff, but not a bolt from the blue.

You can find antecedents for lots of things (some quite contradictory) if you look hard and selectively enough, but given the time it took for Christian notions of salvational equality to translate into our current (varied) notions of equality, implying that current effects derive from ancient causes in this case is a bit of a stretch.

In 1381 English peasants chanted

“When Adam delved and Eve span

Who then was the gentleman?”

but more than 400 years later All Things Bright and Beautiful included this verse, if memory serves:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate;

The Lord God created them,

Each one in his estate.

Given the time it took for notions of political and other forms of equality to become influential, antecedents of equality did not much persuade Christians in power.

Yeah – peasant revolts were one of the things I had in mind. The Xians I was disagreeing with in that post claim that Xianity was THE source of the idea of equality, that without Xianity we wouldn’t have the idea, and I just don’t believe that. Life experience is one source, which is why peasants liked that poem and knights didn’t.